Drug Warriors Score a Major Victory, Los Zetas Celebrate

Rosales Guzman was arrested in the Colonia Independiente neighborhood of the city of Guadalupe after officers spotted him in an SUV and he was unable to give them the slip.
The suspect was arrested in the course of an investigation into the recent series of murders and attacks in Monterrey, the secretariat said.
Rosales Guzman was carrying drugs at the time of his arrest, the Public Safety Secretariat said.

The Latin American Herald Tribune has a picture of Rosales looking very unhappy with a couple of Federale TechnoNinjas here.

Of course, taking down a member of the Gulf Cartel is no longer the coup that it once would have been. Over the last decade, the Gulf Cartel’s former attack dogs, the ferocious paramilitary organization composed primarily of soldiers who were trained in Mexico’s elite special forces or Guatemala’s infamous death squads, have completely broken their leash and taken over most of their former masters’ territory along the Gulf and up into the vast Yucatan marijuana fields of Oaxaca.

The Zetas are currently in primary control of major drug corridors through Nuevo Laredo, Temaulipas into Laredo and, with their partners in the Juarez Cartel, Ciudad Juarez into El Paso. As the Gulf Cartel is weakened by the Mexican Government in Nuevo Leon and the lucrative trafficking center of Monterrey, they bring the Zetas that much closer to complete control of the US Mexico Border from the Southern most tip of Texas all the way to Arizona.

So no, this is no victory in the War against Narcoterrorism. By contrast, it looks like the fight between the Zetas and the Sinaloan Cartel and their satellites and allies may be on the brink of a new, bloodier phase as they fight over the Sonoran Desert and the long Arizona border and it’s attendant bulk of northern border crossing that is the only thing between the Zetas and complete dominance of the entire border from the Atlantic to the Pacific.